OFFSTAGE: David Nail Inspired by Zach Braff Film

(CMT Offstage keeps a 24/7 watch on everything that’s happening with country music artists behind the scenes and out of the spotlight.)

Ever since David Nail‘s “Let It Rain” went to No. 1, I’d been wondering what inspired him to write such a sad, sad cheatin’ song. Because I knew he’d been happily married for a while, and at least as far as I knew, no woman had ever thrown his pile of his things out the window. When he was in Chicago last week, I asked him. “I promise it never happened,” he told me. He actually got the idea from the 2006 movie, The Last Kiss
. “I’d seen this Zach Braff movie, and he’s cheated on his pregnant fiancée. And he goes to her father for advice, and her dad says, ‘It’s gonna be on her terms. When you wait, you may wait forever. It’s her decision,'” Nail said. “So Braff goes and waits, and he’s cold and shivering and sleeping on her front porch. It was just really symbolic. At the very end, you just see the door crack open. You don’t know if she took him back or told him to go to hell. So I told my co-writer, ‘Let’s write a cheatin’ song, but with a guy you can kind of root for.'” The way Nail explained the story of the song is that the guy who cheated is not shying away from responsibility. “Those seven years of good? You can have that kind of relationship, the strongest bond of all, but all it takes is maybe 10 minutes of a mistake to forever change it,” he said. “As why the song isn’t about any actual rain? Nail says that’s not literal, just a metaphor for all the negative the cheater has to go through. So when Nail sings, “Every word, let it hurt, even more than I deserve/Let come down on me,” what’s really coming down on him is her anger.